The Passion of Bobby Sands

Hunger. 2008. Directed by Steve McQueen. Written by Enda Walsh and Steve McQueen. Produced by Laura Hastings-Smith and Robin Gutch. Cinematography by Sean Bobbitt. Edited by Joe Walker. Production design by Tom McCullagh. Music by David Holmes and Leo Abrahams. Sound design by Paul Davies. Costume design by Anushia Nieradzik.

Cast: Michael Fassbender (Bobby Sands), Brian Milligan (Davey Gillen), Liam McMahon (Gerry Campbell), Stuart Graham (Raymond Lohan), Liam Cunningham (Father Dominic Moran), Laine Megaw (Raymond's Wife), Karen Hassan (Gerry's Girlfriend), Frank McCusker (The Governor), Helen Madden (Mrs. Sands), Des McAleer (Mr. Sands), Ciaran Flynn (Twelve Year Old Bobby).

Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s impressive feature debut Hunger, screening at this year's New York Film Festival, is not your normal biopic. And that’s a very good thing. McQueen’s film, which won the Camera d'Or (best first film) at this year's Cannes Film Festival, examines the final days of IRA activist and political prisoner Bobby Sands, as he slowly perished from a 66-day hunger strike in 1981, a pivotal event of the “Troubles,” the protracted war involving Northern Ireland’s struggles against the British for independence. After the briefest of opening titles to quickly set the historical background, it becomes immediately clear that McQueen isn’t aiming for the outraged agitprop of, for example, Ken Loach, who also tackled this conflict in his film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Politics obviously interests McQueen less than the human story being told here. McQueen channels his prodigious visual skills honed from his previous video artworks to astound and assault us with indelible images edited with a nearly unbearable razor’s edge. The film begins not with its putative subject Bobby Sands (he doesn’t even appear until a third of the way into the film), but with prison guard Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), as he peers with haunted eyes into a mirror, exchanges fraught glances with his fearful wife, washes his bloody knuckles in a sink (the result of years of beating prisoners), and, after carefully checking his car for hidden explosives, drives off to work. Once there, Raymond wanders in a permanent daze, separating himself from the garrulous chatter of his colleagues, and wanders off by himself to have a smoke in the snowy cold.

Much of McQueen’s video art are silent works, and in “Deadpan,” one of his most famous pieces, the artist himself restages a scene from one of Buster Keaton’s films by having the façade of a house falls on top of him, McQueen preserved from harm because he is standing where an open doorway falls. “Deadpan” directly addresses McQueen’s artistic debt to silent cinema, and this style carries over to Hunger. McQueen almost entirely dispenses with dialog in this film, with the major exception of a key scene in the middle of the film (more about that later). Sound and image, especially sound, are given primacy here. The film’s main setting is the notorious Maze prison, where the imprisoned IRA members were kept. The visceral images, mostly involving bodily fluids – blood, urine, excrement – are rendered with stark, tactile immediacy, rubbing the viewers’ faces into the muck and grime of the prison, everything beautifully composed but no less difficult to watch. This filth is directly connected to the main political grievances of the prisoners. Before the hunger strikes (there were actually two major ones; the one depicted in the film was the second and more effective) were two other protests, known as the “blanket” and “no wash” protests. The blanket protest stemmed from the stripping from the prisoners of special political status, which recognized that they were different from common criminals and more akin to prisoners of war, which gave them such rights as free assembly, exemption from work detail, and the right to wear civilian clothes instead of prison uniforms. In protest to the elimination of these rights, which was part of Margaret Thatcher’s unrelentingly hard-line methods, the inmates refused to wear any clothes and would only take blankets to cover themselves. Prison guards retaliated against this action by not allowing them to use the toilets, which led to the “no wash” protests, where the prisoners refused to bathe themselves and urinated and defecated inside their cells, smearing the excrement on the walls. In Hunger the camera lingers on long shots of the cells caked with feces, in one case arranged in a very artful bull’s-eye pattern.

The impact of these protests are given form and character in Hunger in the guise of two prisoners we follow in the film’s early scenes. Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan), a new prisoner, is shown the ropes by cellmate Gerry Campbell (Liam MacMahon), and through their experience, we are witness to the excruciating details of brutal life in the prison, in the scenes where the prisoners are forcibly removed from their cells and washed down and their hair savagely cut, with bloody chunks of scalp taken off with it. They pass messages and other items with visitors from outside the prison by hiding and transporting them through various bodily orifices. This illustrates the film’s major theme: the body, specifically the male body, as the vessel and site of resistance to authority. Often stripped naked, beaten and dragged through the corridors by the prison guards, their bodies are literally all they have, and the hunger strike becomes the ultimate form of self-sacrifice and martyrdom to their cause. These methods recall such disparate phenomena as those who immolated themselves to protest the Vietnam War, and (for of course very different reasons) present day suicide bombers. Considering that McQueen and his co-screenwriter Enda Walsh began writing their script well before the Iraq War, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, the present-day parallels are even more remarkably prescient.

After following the two prisoners, we are introduced rather offhandedly to Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), as he is visited by his parents. This serves to ground him and counteract against seeing him as a special person and reinforce the fact that as celebrated (and notorious) as Sands was, he was part of a movement that was much larger than one person. Bobby Sands also, as with the first two prisoners in the film, is subjected to prison brutality, undergoing a vicious cavity search by the guards. Yet there is something singular about Sands, and he does consciously see himself as a symbol. The rest of the film demonstrates this, and quite surprisingly, it reveals itself as very Catholic work, and Sands emerges as a Christ figure. An irreverent, indeed sacrilegious one, to be sure (he rips up his copy of the Bible to use as rolling papers for his cigarettes), but a Christ figure nonetheless. The suffering and physical deterioration of Sands’ hunger strike render this in intricate detail, the sores on his skin looking like nothing less than stigmata.

Sands directly argues the rationale behind his decision to go on the hunger strike in an extraordinary scene in the center of the film, in which he debates a visiting priest (Liam Cunningham) over the wisdom and effectiveness of the strike. After virtually no dialog up to that point, we are confronted with an avalanche of speech as the two men verbally parry in their dialectical debate. Sands is uncompromising in his refusal to negotiate or settle for less than the full reinstatement of their special political status, while the priests stresses the importance of compromise. Their conversation is filmed in a side view of the two men in profile, in a static shot that runs about ten minutes. It represents a breather from the stark violence and an opportunity for the viewer to reflect on the greater meaning of this struggle, and indeed, what it really means to die for a cause.

Unconvinced by the priest’s arguments, Sands goes through with the hunger strike, in which nine other prisoners died. The film focuses on Sands, as he slowly deteriorates, eventually unable to get around without help, as his vision and hearing fail him, and as he begins seeing visions of himself as a young boy appear to him. Again like Christ, he resists the temptations put before him, this time of the plates of food that loom before the camera, as Sands turns away, hurtling toward certain death with steel-like resolve. As he dies, Sands’ image is superimposed with a flock of birds, representing the freedom that death has given him, a rather trite and clichéd image that is the film’s only misstep.

While the sight of a man wasting away from starvation is no one’s idea of a fun night out at the movies, Hunger rewards those able to endure the extreme imagery with a compelling artistic vision. McQueen’s images (aided by Sean Bobbitt’s precisely rendered cinematography) have a cold beauty that forms a striking contrast to the grimness (and griminess) of their content. McQueen, unlike other visual artists transitioning to cinema, has a sure hand with the form, especially in working with his actors. Michael Fassbender (best known to U.S. audiences from Zack Snyder’s 300) as Sands especially impresses in his scene with the priest and in navigating the physical challenges of his role (he clearly actually fasted for the film’s latter scenes).

Hunger screens on September 27 and 28 at the New York Film Festival, and will open in early 2009.

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Jean-Luc Godard, "Breathless" (1960)

This post inaugurates a new feature on this blog, where I will offer thoughts on the works of significant directors, in chronological order, if possible. And what better place to start than with one of the most influential films ever made, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, the nouvelle vague shot heard round the world. Cinema hasn't been the same since.


Breathless (À bout de souffle). 1960. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on an original treatment by François Truffaut. Produced by Georges de Beauregard. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. Edited by Cécile Decugis. Music by Martial Solal.

Cast: Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel Poiccard), Daniel Boulanger (Inspector Vital), Henri-Jacques Huet (Antonio Berruti), Roger Hanin (Carl Zumbach), Van Doude (Van Doude), Liliane David (Liliane), Michel Fabre (Other Inspector), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulesco), Claude Mansard (Used Car Dealer), Jean-Luc Godard (Informer), Richard Balducci (Tolmachoff).

“After all, I’m an asshole.” Such is the self-description of Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the central figure of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, which was, at least in part, a loving homage to the then American gangster B-pictures beloved by Godard and his cohorts at Cahiers du Cinema. The film is in fact dedicated to Monogram Pictures, one of the “Poverty Row” studios that often supplied the bottom half of the bills for the more prestigious mainstream Hollywood features shown in American movie theaters. Thanks largely to the Cahiers critics, those films have been celebrated long after the A-picture super-productions have been relegated to forgotten footnotes of film history. The America-philia carries over into the presence of Breathless’ leading lady, Jean Seberg. The star of Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse and Joan of Arc is a pixie-like presence floating though the luminous Paris of the film’s setting, the irrepressible yang to the aggressive, brutish yin of Poiccard. “J’aime beaucoup la France,” Poiccard opines while cruising in his stolen car, and so does Raoul Coutard’s camera. Long traveling shots of the city abound throughout, supplying the romanticism that this film revels in, drunk off the mystique of the City of Lights. The ghost of Humphrey Bogart hovers over Breathless, in Poiccard’s emulation of that actor’s persona. Poiccard is the lead of not only the movie we see, but the movie in his head, as he gleefully indulges his criminal activities and his quest to enlist his sometime girlfriend Patricia (Seberg) as his own leading lady. But Patricia goes off the script when she informs on him to the police, and refuses to go off into the sunset with him. Instead, after a comically protracted death dance, he is reduced to childish insults. “You make me want to puke,” he tells Patricia before he dies. “What does that mean?” Patricia asks as she emulates Poiccard’s habitual gesture, running her thumb over her lips. She turns her back on us, and the film fades out.

The non-stop jaunty jazz score by Martial Solal is the perfect accompaniment to the improvisational style of Godard’s film. A manifesto in opposition to the studio-bound productions of most French films, Godard took his camera to the streets, writing his actors’ dialogue day by day. “I never knew what would happen to Poiccard next,” Belmondo says in an interview included on the Criterion DVD. Godard’s first cut of the film was very long and unwieldy, and he knew he needed to cut extensively, but found it difficult to get rid of necessary scenes. Godard came up with the idea of cutting within shots, breaking continuity, a technique that became known as the jump cut. It was a radical visual style, well in keeping with the radicalism of the project. This technique has now been overused to the point of cliché, but seeing it here in this context, it retains a startling freshness. As does the entire film.

Breathless trailer:



The beginning:



The ending ("Qu'est-ce que c'est 'degueulasse'?"):

2008 New York Korean Film Festival Review Round-up #2

My Father (Hwang Dong-hyuk)



A recent true story is the inspiration for My Father, whose premise at first glance threatens to be yet another occasion to wallow in syrupy melodrama. Daniel Henney (cue the screaming teenage schoolgirls), a Korean-American star who first made his name in the Korean television series My Name Is Kim Sam-soon, is James, an adoptee in America who travels to Korea (as an army soldier, for reasons that are a little fuzzy) to search for his birth parents. He appears on a television program with other orphans searching for their parents. He soon finds out his mother is dead and that his father (Kim Yong-chul) is on death row for murder. The rest of the film depicts his discovery of his father’s and his own past, the deceased mother an elusive ghost only seen in flashbacks and eventually a photo. James goes through the usual identity struggles and connects with his Korean heritage by discovering his Korean name (Gong Eun-chul), learning Korean to communicate with his father, and befriending a fellow Korean soldier (Kim In-kwon). The premise is unpromising, and the film has a few flaws, the most serious being, unfortunately, the limited acting ability of its star. Henney has an easygoing, affable persona that has considerable appeal, but when he is called upon to perform very emotional scenes, this still remains a bit beyond his ability. Also, the depictions of the ugly American GIs are crudely over the top, and a cheap attempt to give James an easy foil. However, the acting deficit on Henney’s part is more than made up for by Kim Young-chul’s turn as the condemned father. Kim provides a compelling gravitas and sense of tragedy and quite effectively conveys the shifting nature of his character, as we find out that he is not all he seems to be. Hwang’s script deftly avoids the myriad pitfalls inherent in this material with a smart script that takes unexpected turns, as the full situation is gradually and surprisingly revealed, overall making this a strong film. The film’s end credits feature documentary footage of the actual adoptee whose story inspired the film (a device, incidentally, also employed in Forever the Moment). (Aug. 23, 29)






Spare (Lee Seung-han)

This is a down-and-dirty, and, as per its title, spare action flick inspired by Hong Kong gangster films, as is the similarly minded City of Violence, Ryu Seung-wan’s last film. The opening is quite promising, featuring an elegant gliding shot through a set of corridors and Japanese-style sliding doors, set to an ominous soundtrack of booming drums. The film mostly follows Gwang-tae (Lim Joon-il) who owes a lot of money to loan shark Myung-soo (Kim Su-hyeon). Gwang-tae is sought after by Sato (Mitsuki Koga), a yakuza who offers to pay him an astronomical sum to be a kidney donor for his ailing boss, since Gwang-tae has the rare blood type necessary for a successful transplant. Gwang-tae eagerly agrees, since this will cancel his debt. However, his friend Gil-do (Jeong-woo), promising to be a middleman to deliver the money to Myung-soo, instead steals the money and uses it to fuel his raging gambling addiction. This provides the occasion, or should I say excuse, for the exciting “100 percent real action” the film’s promotional material promises, making pains to point out the film’s lack of CGI effects. Those expecting something similar to Ryu’s City of Violence will be sorely disappointed, although both films share two actors (Lim Joon-il and Jung Woo) and a cinematographer (Kim Yeong-chol). Unlike Ryu’s film, which enlivened its standard scenario with impressively staged and brilliantly choreographed fight sequences, Lee’s film has surprisingly few fight scenes, and the ones it does have are ineptly edited and staged, most notably a seemingly endless scene in which Gwang-tae and Sato fight a rival gang in a parking garage, which is awkwardly cross-cut with action elsewhere. The film strenuously attempts to distract us from the woefully underdeveloped story with gimmicky visual tricks and an odd device of snarky off-screen audience members which completely falls flat. The cruddy digital video with which the film is shot adds to the cheap, throwaway feel. (Aug. 24, 25)






Going by the Book (Ra Hee-chan)



Going by the Book, scripted by director, screenwriter and playwright Jang Jin (Guns and Talks, Someone Special, Murder, Take One), is a sly, sharply observed comedy that exhibits the patented humor of Jang’s other films. Jung Jae-young, a frequent star of Jang Jin’s own films, plays Do-man, a traffic cop in the small town of Sampo who is a strict stickler for procedure, a character trait that fuels the film’s humor. Do-man used to be a detective, but ran afoul of certain higher-ups, and was consequently demoted to traffic cop, a duty which he performs with the same enthusiastic gusto and heightened sense of justice as he did in his previous position. A new police chief (Son Byung-ho) comes to town, and Do-man greets him by giving him a traffic ticket for making an illegal left turn. Sampo has recently been plagued by a spate of bank robberies, and the chief decides to respond to this by staging a simulation of a bank robbery for training purposes, and he drafts Do-man to play the robber. Hilariously, this turns out to be a grave error on the chief’s part, as Do-man plays his role to the hilt, giving the exercise much more realism than anyone involved bargained for. This farcical premise is injected with rather barbed satire directed toward authority figures, police procedure, and rapacious media. Jung delivers a funny, remarkably nuanced performance, conveying intriguing shadings to his character, all throughout maintaining a deadpan Buster Keaton-like persona. The excellent supporting cast, especially Lee Young-eun as the young female bank-teller, also impresses here. The style of Going By the Book is practically indistinguishable from that of screenwriter Jang Jin’s own films, and very little of the director’s own personality comes through here, making Ra little more than an interpreter of Jang’s vision. Ra has said as much in interviews, confirming the obvious fact that notwithstanding the actual director who has signed his name, Jang Jin is in fact the true auteur of this film. (Aug. 23, 25, 30)

2008 New York Korean Film Festival Review Round-up

The 2008 New York Korean Film Festival, screening from August 22 to August 31 at Cinema Village and BAM Cinematek, is a mixed bag, much like Korean cinema in general these days. These are tough times, both creatively and financially. According to a recent piece in The Hollywood Reporter, the lowest point this year came this past May, when Korean films accounted for just 7.8% of the box office, the lowest since records began being kept in 2000. This is far from the heights of the so-called “Korean wave” just a few short years ago. Things are turning around, thanks to two recent hits: Kang Woo-suk’s Public Enemy Returns, the third installment featuring Sol Kyung-gu in the lead role; and The Good, The Bad, and the Weird, Kim Jee-woon’s mega-budgeted “kimchi Western” which is on track to perhaps be this year’s biggest hit. Whether the industry can build on these successes to become truly profitable once again is anyone’s guess. To be continued, as they say. However, there are still some interesting films being made, and a few gems here and there, as is borne out by this year’s films, the most impressive so far being the Jung Brothers' historical Gothic tale Epitaph, which I reviewed here when it screened earlier this year at New Directors/New Films. Below are reviews of some of this year's selections.


Once Upon a Time (Jeong Yong-gi)





Once Upon a Time, like Epitaph, is set during the Japanese occupation of Korea, in this case, the very late stages of this period, just before Japan’s surrender and Korea’s concomitant liberation. However, Jeong utilizes a strikingly different strategy in representing this historical time, trading the somber, moody scariness of Epitaph for lively, lighthearted adventure and derring-do that takes more than a few cues from the Indiana Jones films. Much like that 1940’s adventure serial-inspired series, Once Upon a Time revolves around a treasure coveted by the film’s characters, in this case “The Light of the East,” a large diamond that was a legendary relic of the Silla Dynasty, doggedly sought after by a Japanese general (Kim Eung-soo) who wishes to bring it back to Japan as a colonial prize. The general’s quest is complicated by Bong-gu (Park Yong-woo), also known as Kanemura, a conman and master thief who trades in stolen jewels and other treasures on the black market. Bong-gu schemes to steal this diamond, as it will be his biggest game as a treasure hunter. However, a mysterious masked serial thief, known as “Haedanghwa,” gets there before him and swipes the diamond. A major player in this caper is Choon-ja (Lee Bo-young), also known as Haruko, a sexy nightclub singer who is not all she seems. Throw in a pair of hapless resistance fighters and you have the ingredients for breezy, fairly uncomplicated entertainment. However, some elements unique to the historical period of the film carry deeper resonances. For example, there is the suppression of Korean culture by the Japanese, represented here by the Korean taegukgi flag furtively hidden from the authorities and the taking of Japanese names by major characters, which was historically forced on the populace (even though it is treated much more lightly here). The sign outside the nightclub where much of the film is set reads “Koreans and Dogs Not Allowed.” Also, a scene late in the film shows Japanese soldiers gunning down civilians indiscriminately in the street. The film doesn’t dwell on these details too much, concentrating more on action, humor, and the flirtation between Bong-gu and Choon-ja. Once Upon a Time is diverting, unpretentious entertainment with the curiously strong flavor of Hollywood films of the same period, down to the ending which has distinct echoes of The Maltese Falcon. “The stuff that dreams are made of,” indeed. (Aug. 28, 29)







May 18 (Kim Ji-hoon)


Another evocation of Korean history, this time of a more recent period, is provided by May 18, a major hit in Korea last summer. The titular date occurred in 1980, in a tragic incident in which thousands of students and other civilians in Kwangju were massacred by General Chun Doo-hwan’s forces, as the military carried out a virtual civil war against its own populace. The film drops us directly into this situation, with no explanation or background given about the student movement that grew as a result of the brief window of democracy provided by the assassination of President Park Chung-hee the previous year, as well as Chun’s quest to graduate from the head of the military to the country’s new ruler. For Korean audiences familiar with this history, such explanation is unnecessary. For foreign audiences, this will be confusing – a brief trip to a bookstore or library’s Korean history section, or, at the very least, a quick Wikipedia search is recommended before viewing. The historical macrocosm serves as a backdrop to the rather crudely sentimental story of cab driver Min-woo (Kim Sang-kyung, from Turning Gate and Memories of Murder), working to put his younger brother Jin-woo (Lee Yoon-ki, The King and the Clown) through law school. Min-woo tries to set his brother up with Shin-ae (Lee Yo-won, Take Care of My Cat, When Romance Meets Destiny), a pretty nurse at the local hospital, although Min-woo is obviously the one in love with her, always arranging to meet with her under the cover of concern for his studious brother’s lack of a social life. Shin-ae’s father Heung-su (Ahn Sung-ki), a former Special Forces commander, gets wind of the military’s plans to brutally crush the antigovernment protests, and tries to use his influence to stop them, but to no avail. The military occupation soon arrives, a nuclear bomb dropped upon the lives of the film’s characters, as the soldiers beat and shoot people indiscriminately, and the media parrots the government propaganda depicting the entire populace of Kwangju as communist rebels. The first half of the film alternates between crude humor and the budding romance between Min-woo and Shin-ae. After the bloody, brutal suppression by the military, and the civilians’ resistance, led by Heung-su, the film unnecessarily attempts to wring even more tears and emotion from the situation by relentlessly underlining the violent impact of these events on the film’s characters. As significant as the film is, being the first major feature to directly take on the subject of the Kwangju massacre, restraint, subtlety, and nuance are apparently words that don’t exist in the vocabularies of director Kim or screenwriter Na Hyeon, at least as far as this film is concerned. The only thing that prevents May 18 from completely drowning in its soap opera theatrics, which are extreme even by Korean standards, are the appealing performances by its cast, which partially temper the sentimentality. There is a great film yet to be made about this event, but sadly, this isn’t it. For a truly great film that touches on this tragedy, I refer you to Lee Chang-dong’s 1999 masterwork Peppermint Candy. (Aug. 24, 27, 31)







Forever the Moment (Yim Soon-rye)





May 18 screenwriter Na Hyeon also penned the script for this film, also based on a true story. Director Yim Soon-rye's previous films Three Friends and Waikiki Brothers were excellent, sensitively directed character studies that established Yim as one of Korea’s best directors. She is also one of the very few working woman directors in Korea. In sharp contrast to the overwrought schmaltz of May 18, Forever the Moment is infinitely more successful in rendering recent events with sentiment that is truly earned. The film tells the story of the Korean women’s handball team who competed at the 2004 Athens Olympics. It goes far beyond the typical sports-film clichés with beautifully written characters given life by the wonderful quartet of actresses featured here – Moon So-ri (Oasis, A Good Lawyer’s Wife, Family Ties), Kim Jeong-eun (Marrying the Mafia, Blossom Again), Cho Eun-ji (The President’s Last Bang, Driving with My Wife’s Lover), and Kim Ji-young (Innocent Steps, Old Miss Diary). As in her previous films, Yim focuses closely on the vicissitudes of her characters, in this case privileging this over the mechanics and process of the sport that is the presumed subject. At the outset, Mi-sook (Moon So-ri), despite having been part of a team that won gold at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, has come upon financially rough times. Her husband is basically absent from the family, cheated by a former business partner and on the run from loan sharks, leaving Mi-sook to raise her son alone, and forcing her to take a rather humiliating job at a supermarket, barking out the produce specials of the day. Her former teammate Hye-kyung (Kim Jeung-eun) has had a far more successful career coaching in Japan. She is brought back to Korea by the team owner, who drafts her to coach a team that can win gold again at the Olympics. She persuades the reluctant Mi-sook, unwilling to return to a sport which has done very little for her financially, to return to the team. However, Hye-kyung has a rough time getting the team into shape, mostly due to internal conflict between the older star players and the jealous younger upstarts. Her perceived lack of satisfactory progress prompts the owners to replace her with Seung-pil (Eom Tae-woong), a hard-assed male coach who seeks to whip the team into shape using methods learned from European coaches, with strict training regimens and diet supervision. Seung-pil also happens to be Hye-kyung’s ex-boyfriend; she initially quits, but decides to swallow her pride and rejoin as a player. Still, she frequently clashes with Seung-pil over what in her opinion is a needlessly harsh coaching style.

Despite these challenges, the team eventually reaches the Olympics, leading to the final showdown with the Danish team. Even though the outcome of the match is already well-known to Korean audiences (I won’t give it away to those unfamiliar with this story), the latter scenes still retain a sense of tension and suspense. But the sports are mostly a backdrop to the vivid portraits of these women’s difficulties and conflicts with themselves and others, for example fellow player Jeong-ran (Kim Ji-young), a tough woman who runs a restaurant with her husband Jin-gook (Jeong Seok-young), yet who has a more vulnerable side, unable to conceive due to her misuse of pills to manipulate her menstrual cycle so it would not interfere with her training. Much comic relief is provided by team goalie Soo-hee (Cho Eun-ji), who is perennially on the search for a boyfriend, occasioning a nice little scene where she exacts revenge on a blind date (popular star Ha Jeong-woo, in a cameo) who ditches her and whom she overhears insulting her over the phone. With a bracing realism and a refreshing lack of emotional manipulation, Forever the Moment puts these women front and center, allowing the small, moving moments to resonate throughout the piece. Moon So-ri is great as usual, but the real revelation here is Kim Jeong-eun’s performance. This popular TV and film comedienne has recently moved into more dramatic roles, and here she builds on her previous work in Blossom Again to deliver an impressively nuanced and complex role. The film’s Korean title translates as “The Best Moment of Our Lives,” but despite the rather sappy title (slightly better that the nonsensical English one), it is a truly rousing and inspiring film. Millions of Koreans obviously agreed, making this a major hit when it was released this January. (Aug. 24, 27)

"Japanese Screen Classics: In Honor of Madame Kawakita": Review Round-up

"Japanese Screen Classics: In Honor of Madame Kawakita," a series of 24 classic works of Japanese cinema, screens at the Walter Reade Theater through August 14. The "Madame Kawakita" in question is the late Kashiko Kawakita, the film programmer, distributor, and all-around champion and promoter of Japanese cinema. The series is organized around the eight directors who have won the Kawakita Award, honoring lifetime achievement in Japanese film, including such towering figures as Akira Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima, Seijun Suzuki, and Shohei Imamura, as well as relatively lesser-known directors as Kaneto Shindo and the documentarian Sumiko Haneda. Yoji Yamada and Kon Ichikawa are also featured in the series; each director is represented by three films apiece. Below are brief reviews of notable films in the series.

Her Brother (Kon Ichikawa, 1960)


Shot expressively in widescreen and muted but incredibly textured color, Ichikawa’s film about the complex and tortured relationship between two siblings, Gen (Keiko Kishi) and Hekiro (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), is one of his greatest films. Anchored by the beautifully nuanced and volcanic performances by Keiko Kishi as the older sister Gen and Kinuyo Tanaka as the ailing, hyper-religious stepmother, Ichikawa makes full use of his wide frame to depict the warring family members in monumental close-ups, alternating with scenes of kinetic and chaotic movement (e.g. Gen being doggedly stalked by a police officer), and wonderfully comic sight gags (e.g. the gaggle of geese that interrupt the policeman’s attempts to seduce Gen). In the film’s latter scenes, as the brother slowly dies of tuberculosis, the camera framings are less claustrophobic, and convey the unbridgeable separation of the family members from each other. Hekiro’s death elicits a numbed response from Gen, finally separated from her true soulmate. The great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, that great color artist of postwar Japanese cinema (e.g. Ozu’s Floating Weeds), contributes a burnished look that is perfectly commensurate to the film’s period setting. The nuances of the sibling’s relationship are quite fascinating. Gen’s self-sacrificial actions toward her brother, bailing him out and covering for him, are very much self-serving, since by caring for her brother, she can avoid fully growing up. Hekiro’s pathetic attempts at petty thuggery only very thinly disguise the scared and vulnerable person underneath, which comes fully to the fore as he goes through the stages of dying from TB. In the film’s cruelest irony, the family only exhibits a sense of humanity toward one another when they are gathered around Hekiro’s deathbed. (Aug. 4)



A Last Note (Kaneto Shindo, 1995)


Shindo’s last feature starring his wife, the great Nobuko Otawa, this is a genial, charming film – surprisingly so for a film dealing with aging, suicide, and dementia. The title refers to the suicide of a carpenter who left a terse note – “It’s over” – before hanging himself. He places a large stone next to the note, to be used to pound nails into the coffin that he had made himself before committing suicide. The film features a trio of wonderful veteran actresses, including Haruko Sugimura, who plays Yoko Morimoto, an actress staying at her usual summer retreat. There are several surreally comic set pieces, including a foiled robbery attempt, and the subsequent commendation by the police. The film moves smoothly, maybe a little too smoothly, but is a pleasant enough experience. The story focuses on elderly characters that are very rarely seen on screen. Eighty-three years old at the time he made the film, A Last Note has a freewheeling, digressive air, mixing odd characters and incident, including an erotically charged wedding ritual right out of an Imamura film, frequent allusions to Chekhov, and a celebration of the resilience of older people. Touchingly, the film also serves as a tribute to Otowa, Shindo’s frequent star, who was suffering from terminal cancer during the shoot, and died just days after its completion.

Tora-san’s Sunrise and Sunset (Yoji Yamada, 1976)



Opening with a hilarious parody of Jaws, this installment, the seventeenth, of the beloved series of films about Tora-san, the genial everyman, continually underestimated by his family members and his friends, who turns out to be the wisest and most perceptive of all the other characters, is an enjoyable and touching film, that made me want to go out and see the rest of the series. At the outset, Tora-san takes serious umbrage upon hearing that his nephew was teased at school because Tora-san is his uncle, whereupon he goes out to get drunk. He comes upon a seemingly destitute old man (Jukichi Uno), who attempts to leave the bar without paying for his drinks, angering the proprietress. Tora-san gallantly pays for drinks, and they go out on the town barhopping. They both come home stinking drunk, in the old man’s case quite literally. The man angers Tora-san’s family, ordering everyone around. Eventually Tora-san sits him down, explaining “This isn’t an inn,” which surprises the old man, who thought that was exactly what it was. To make amends, he draws a doodle on a piece of paper, telling Tora-san to sell it at a bookstore. Tora-san is dubious, but does so, and learns that this alleged vagrant is actually the world-famous artist Ikenouchi. Tora-san returns home, displaying the large sum he received from selling the drawing, and his family is ashamed over how quickly they leapt to conclusions about the man based on appearances. Tora-san crosses paths with Ikenouchi again, and they spend time together, where Tora-san gets a taste of a life of riches and luxury. He meets and falls in love with Botan (Kiwako Taichi), a giggling geisha who has a semi-tragic back story, having been swindled out of 2 million yen by an arrogant businessman who refuses to return it. Kiyoshi Atsumi played Tora-san for nearly three decades, until his death in the mid-1990s. The films definitely followed a formula, and these films weren’t especially innovative stylistically, but Yoji Yamada, who directed most of the episodes, found remarkable variations on this scenario, as the series reflected changes in Japanese society over the years, as well as preserving a somewhat idealized and nostalgic sense of the past. Tora-san, the genial and kindhearted, if uneducated and impulsive, itinerant salesman always had a home among his family – his sister Sakura (Cheiko Baisho) and his family’s humble sweets shop. The filmmaking is solid and functional, with little flash, but this works very well in the service of the scenario, and is a very entertaining entry in this popular and long-lasting film series. Keep an eye out for a cameo by Chishu Ryu, the great actor most famous from his numerous roles in Ozu’s films, as a rather eccentric priest. (Aug. 2)

Review Archive: Christopher Nolan's "Memento"

On the occasion of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Night shattering box-office records left and right, and earning across-the-board rapturous critical notices (although there are some dissenters, and it seems the backlash has begun), I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at one of his earlier films, Memento. Below is a review I wrote at the time of the film's release in 2000.


Memento. 2000. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the short story "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan. Produced by Suzanne Todd and Jennifer Todd. Cinematography by Wally Pfister. Edited by Dody Dorn. Music by David Julyan. Production design by Patti Podesta. Costume design by Cindy Evans.

Cast: Guy Pearce (Leonard), Carrie-Anne Moss (Natalie), Joe Pantoliano (Teddy), Mark Boone Jr. (Burt), Jorja Fox (Leonard's Wife), Stephen Tobolowsky (Sammy), Callum Keith Rennie (Dodd).

"Now, where was I?" These are the last spoken words (or are they the first?) of Christopher Nolan's Moebius strip of a film, Memento. The speaker of these words, Lennie (Guy Pearce), is obsessed with finding the man who raped and murdered his wife (Jorja Fox). Nolan's film is yet another entry in the well-worn neo-noir genre, much like his first film, Following, in which a man who decides to follow random strangers on the street eventually becomes sucked into the lives of the people he follows. The two films share a more significant similarity: they enliven their rather standard neo-noir scenarios by playing with structure and chronology. Following chops up its narrative by presenting scenes from the beginning, middle, and ending of the story, forcing us to reassemble the plot in our own mind. Memento rearranges its sequences by using a Betrayal-like backward chronology, which is, however, complicated by linear black-and-white inserts between scenes that show us Lennie talking on the phone to an unknown person.

Memento represents a major leap forward from Nolan's first effort in that it continually questions its own method of storytelling, casting serious doubt about whether a "proper" order to this story, or any other, can even exist. "Do you realize what a metaphysical can of worms this opens up?" John Cusack's character asks in Being John Malkovich, another film dealing with the question of what constitutes identity. We could very well ask this question of the central situation depicted in Memento.

So in the spirit of Lennie's character, let us consider the known facts. Fact one: insurance investigator Lennie's wife was raped and murdered. Fact two: during the attack, as he attempted to defend his wife, Lennie suffered a blow to the head, causing the mental condition that provides the plot's impetus -- he has lost his short term memory, allowing him to retain information for only about a few minutes at a time. As he constantly explains, he does not suffer from amnesia; he remembers who he is, and his life up until his wife's murder, but he is unable to create new memories. Fact three: the perpetrator was a man named John G. These are the only things that are known for sure. Armed with this information, all the while struggling to function with his handicap, Lennie sets out to find his wife's killer.

Lennie's condition is handled throughout the film in various ways. Beyond the obvious distress and confusion Lennie suffers, it also occasions many instances of humor that occur throughout the story. Lennie befriends a man who calls himself Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who often expresses exasperation at how Lennie explains his condition and other events over and over. "But I can keep telling the same jokes," Teddy says. However, his condition also allows people to take advantage of him, for example, perhaps, Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), the bartender he meets during his investigation.

To aid himself and simply to cope with his handicap, Lennie writes notes to himself, and carries a Polaroid to snap photos of the people he meets, jotting down their names and relevant information on the photos. Of Teddy, he writes, "Don't believe his lies." Of Natalie, he writes, "She has lost someone also. She will help you out of pity." As he explains to the caller during the black-and-white insert scenes, it is important to have a logical system in order to function. Since handwritten notes can be lost or hopelessly mixed up, he tattoos directly onto his skin the most important information, such as "John G. raped and murdered your wife."

Memento's structure throws us for a loop in two senses. It replicates Lennie's condition in its backward structure, forcing us to rely on our own memory of earlier (that is, later) scenes in order to make sense of later (that is, earlier) scenes. But, more importantly, it calls into question, and indeed even mocks, the value of the act of detection. In the film's first scene, which begins with a Polaroid of a murdered man fading into white, we see Lennie killing his "friend," Teddy. Why? Once we understand that the story will be told backwards, we are somewhat reassured that all answers will be revealed at the "end" of the film. But by the end, the rug is pulled out from under us and it becomes impossible to know for sure what to think, most significantly since the film's last scenes strongly suggest that Lennie may not in fact be quite the helpless victim we have assumed him to be all along.

Memento excels in posing its philosophical and metaphysical queries through the direct action of the plot, never allowing the pace to flag by taking its own conceit too seriously. Lennie, much as he did in his former life as an insurance investigator, relies on careful records of fact and observation in order to solve his own mystery. He depends on mechanical methods of observation, most notably his trusty Polaroid. He even extols his methods as superior to memory, noting to Teddy that memories can distort, using as his example the perennial unreliability of eyewitness testimony. However, there are significant instances where his system fails him. One example concerns Natalie, whom we have been fooled into thinking of as someone who is there to help Lennie in the film's early scenes. Later, however, she bitterly mocks his condition, calling him a "retard," telling him she can even call his dead wife a whore, and it won't matter since he will soon forget it anyway. She manages to goad Lennie into hitting her in the face. She leaves, while Lennie frantically searches for a pen to write down what has just happened. But he loses the memory, and Natalie is able to explain he bruises by telling him a drug dealer she works for, and wants Lennie to get rid of, beat her.

In fact, Lennie's condition makes his quest an exercise in futility and absurdity. As Teddy says late in the film, what good is getting revenge if it will only be forgotten moments later? However, Lennie rejects, or professes to reject, this assessment of his situation. "I must believe there is a world outside myself," he says. "If I close my eyes, the world does not disppear." Justice done will still be justice done, whether or not he remembers it.

Lennie's condition not only allows Memento to pose serious questions about identity, but also allows the film to function as a brilliant parody of the neo-noir genre. There are many instances where Nolan punctures the hallmarks of this type of film. In one scene Lennie finds himself running, and asks himself why he is running. He looks around and sees another man near him also running and thinks, "Oh, I'm chasing this guy." But as the man begins shooting at him, he realizes, "Wait, he's chasing me!" The desk clerk at the hotel where Lennie is staying rents two rooms for Lennie, explaining, "We're a little slow this month." Natalie, skeptical about the truth of Lennie's condition, conducts an experiments. She has a bar patron, herself, and Lennie all spit into a mug of beer, after which she successfully serves it to him.

Christopher Nolan, with both Following and this film, proves himself to be a director well worth close attention. Nolan's crisp, precise script (based on a short story by his brother Jonathan) moves at a swift clip, capturing the loops of double-crosses, lies, betrayals, and "explanations" which prove to be anything but. Memento is also anchored by excellent performances all around by actors who acquit themselves with letter-perfect precision in keeping the audience guessing as to their true motives and affiliations. Especially fine is Joe Pantoliano, who proves once again, as he has in such films as Midnight Run and The Matrix, that he is one of the best character actors currently working. Guy Pearce is also impressive, effectively and poignantly conveying the confusion and uncertainty of Lennie's struggle to cling to a sense of who he is.

Children's Crusade

Flower in the Pocket. 2007. Written, directed and edited by Liew Seng Tat. Produced by Michelle Lo. Cinematography by Albert Hue. Production design by Gan Siong King.

Cast: Wong Zi Jiang (Ma Li Ohm), Lim Ming Wei (Ma Li Ahh), Amira Nashua Binti Shahiran (Atan/Ayu), James Lee (Ah Sui), Azman Bin Md. Hasan (Mamat), Lo Kah Loong (Ah Fatt), Mislina Mustaffa (Atan's Mother), Mak Inom (Atan's Grandma), Farah Binti Abdul Rani (Malay Tudung Teacher).

Think of it as a Malaysian 400 Blows. Liew Seng Tat’s debut feature Flower in the Pocket, which screened this past Sunday at the Asian-American International Film Festival '08, is yet another great example of the fecundity of cinematic talent currently coming out of Malaysia. Some of the most impressive films from this nation have emerged from the Da Huang Pictures production stable, which, besides Liew, also includes fellow directors and collaborators James Lee (director of Before We Fall in Love Again, and who plays the father of the two young boys the film follows), Tan Chui Mui (director of Love Conquers All, and who used her festival prize money to help fund this film), and Amir Muhammad (The Big Durian, The Last Communist, Tokyo Magic Hour). Flower in the Pocket is this production house’s latest offering, and it shares many affinities with their other films: digitally shot, elliptical in its structure, littered with curious and seemingly inexplicable scenes, and suffused with a weird sense of humor that clashes with more somber elements. But Liew injects a wilder, more rambunctious sensibility, embodied by his two young protagonists, Chinese brothers Ma Li Ahh (Lim Ming Wei) and Ma Li Ohm (Wong Zi Jiang). They live with their single father Ah Sui (James Lee), who designs and repairs mannequins. Ah Sui, depressed and bitter over his failed relationship with the boys’ mother, has mostly abdicated his role as father, leaving his sons more or less to their own devices. The absence of the boys’ mother is very subtly referenced in the film’s title. As Liew explained in an interview he gave to the film site Twitch, the title is inspired by a Japanese Mother’s Day tradition, in which people wear flowers that represent one’s mother. A red flower means one’s mother is still living; a white flower means one’s mother is deceased. For the two brothers, Liew says: “That is why it's ‘Flower in the Pocket,’ because … the mother character doesn't appear at all… That's why their flower is pretty much in their pocket. It's unseen, you don’t know what color it is. You don't even know whether there IS a flower.” The brothers live very much in isolation; we don’t see them together with their father until relatively late in the film and they seem to live completely separate lives from their father. Also isolating them is their poor understanding of the Malay language; at school, they must have their Mandarin speech translated for them into Malay, usually by a rather bratty and haughty girl schoolmate. The film opens with Ma Li Ahh, the younger and more mischievous brother, being berated by his teacher for not doing his homework. This scene also makes use of a verbal pun concerning his name and its mispronounced similarity to “Maria.” “That’s a girl’s name!” his teacher (Farah Binti Abdul Rani) says. “What kind of name is that for a boy?”

The boys are befriended by Atan, aka Ayu (Amira Nasuha Binti Shahiran), a tomboyish girl who, when she first meets them, renames them for her own convenience. Her home life is in sharp contrast to boys’; even though Atan’s father isn’t in the picture, she is doted on by both her mother (Mislina Mustaffa) and grandmother (Mak Inom), even though Atan often regards their close attention as a nuisance. Much like Abbas Kiarostami’s films which focus on children such as Where is the Friend’s House?, Flower in the Pocket derives much of its considerable charm and warmth from its close, humorous observation of these kids’ activities, such as an early scene with the brothers savoring KFC ketchup packets, which pays off in a later scene when they use these packets to cook up a unique culinary concoction of ketchup, boiled rice, raw eggs, and hot water.

The film’s first half is freewheeling and nearly plot-free, following its characters in a laconic fashion. In contrast to the generally cheerful boys, their father Ah Sui walks around in a distracted daze, engrossed in working on his mannequins, seemingly more comfortable around these lifeless, disembodied figures than actual human beings. He has some odd exchanges with the Indian man he sells the mannequins to; at one point he admonishes Ah Sui for making the breasts on the female mannequins too realistic. This connects to a strange medical condition he suffers from: he complains to his doctor that his heart literally hurts, and water mysteriously leaks from his nipple. This mixture of minimalist aesthetics and broad, almost slapstick humor (much of which, I suspect, would resonate more with a local audience) is what makes Flower in the Pocket a singular, and faintly unsettling, work. More somber elements are introduced in the film’s latter half, as the father’s benign neglect of his sons very nearly leads to tragedy. However, things end on a more optimistic note, revolving around a unique approach to learning to swim, which provides a way for Ah Sui to bond at long last with his sons.

Flower in the Pocket won the Tiger Award at this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival and the New Currents Award at last year’s Pusan International Film Festival. Despite its often naughty sense of humor, its minimal digital aesthetics and its unusual approach to storytelling may make this film a bit too rarified for general audiences (which was borne out by the sparse attendance at Sunday night’s screening). Still, if it happens to show up at your local film festival, it is more than worth your time.

Flower in the Pocket is available on DVD from Da Huang Pictures’ online shop.

Review Archive: Takashi Miike's "Dead or Alive"

Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django will receive its New York premiere tomorrow at Japan Society as a co-presentation of the New York Asian Film Festival and the Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film. You can read my review of that film here. Miike has a vast and varied filmography, and one of the highlights of his incredibly eclectic oeuvre is his 1999 film Dead or Alive, the first installment of one of the most bizarre trilogies ever created. Below is a review I wrote at the time of the film's U.S. theatrical release.

Dead or Alive (Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha). 1999. Directed by Takashi Miike. Written by Ichiro Ryu. Produced by Katsumi Ono, Makoto Okada, and Toshiki Kimura. Cinematography by Hideo Yamamoto. Edited by Taiji Shimamura. Music by Kouji Endou. Art direction by Akira Ishige.

Cast: Riki Takeuchi (Ryuichi), Sho Aikawa (Detective Jojima), Renji Ishibashi (Aoki), Hitoshi Ozawa (Satake), Shingo Tsurumi (Chen), Kaoru Sugita (Mrs. Jojima), Ren Osugi (Yan), Susumu Terajima (Inoue).

This yakuza thriller by Japanese cult director Takashi Miike, above all else, is a letter-perfect illustration of the saying, "Nothing succeeds like excess," which could also serve as Miike's credo. We are thrown immediately into the whirring blender of the film's action in the opening scene, which is cut like a self-contained trailer for the film itself. We become privy to such sights as: in the very first minute, a naked body falling from the top of a building; a black leather-clad stripper writhing on a stage; a man doing what looks like a mile-long line of coke; a blond-haired man vigorously fucking another man against a urinal; the aforementioned coke enthusiast shot to death through the roof of his limousine; and a yakuza gang on a rampage through the club, shooting everyone in sight, and eventually killing the two men having sex in the bathroom.

Things eventually slow down enough for us to discern the plot and main characters. What reveals itself here is a trope that will be immediately familiar to crime film aficionados: the parallel cop and gangster story motif which is a hallmark of such films as John Woo's The Killer and Michael Mann's Heat, which Dead or Alive, at least superficially, most resembles. Much like Al Pacino's character in Heat, Detective Jojima (Sho Aikawa) has allowed his obsession with crushing the yakuzas' operations to wreck his home life. He no longer sleeps with his wife, preferring the couch. His wife (Kaoru Sugita) constantly reminds him of the importance of saving money for their daughter's operation, offering to get a job herself. He dismissively waves her away, promising to take care of it.

The yakuza Ryuichi (Riki Takeuchi), who could be an analogue to Robert De Niro in Heat, while as ruthless and violent as can be imagined (illustrated by a scene where he coolly disposes of one of his men caught trying to run off with money from a heist), is not without his admirable qualities. Ryuichi uses the money from his criminal exploits to fund his younger brother's studies in the U.S. Ryuichi is no mere mindless killer, but wishes in his own way to do right, at least by his own family. In one scene, he ruefully hints that his dissatisfaction over his lack of opportunities in Japanese society has led him down the criminal road. It is Ryuichi who reminds the detective during an interrogation that he also has obligations toward his family.

So far, nothing here veers too far from the well-established tropes of the yakuza genre. But the difference lies in Miike's approach to his material, which gains its considerable verve and style from his gleeful disregard for convention and general good taste. Miike uses such stylistic tics as extreme slo-mo and endless shootouts to beautifully parodic effect. Miike's patented eye for the absurd comes through in such scenes as: Jojima's pornographer informer, introduced filming a bestiality scene using his pet dog; a birthday party shootout featuring a man in a chicken suit riddled with bullets; and most outrageous of all, the final showdown between the gangster and the detective.

It is in this final scene that Miike's penchant for excess is most extravagantly, and hilariously, revealed. The scene begins with a wickedly funny bit of meta-commentary by Ryuichi, who mutters, "Here comes the final scene," when he sees Jojima coming toward him. For those who haven't seen the film, it would be criminal of me to reveal more, but suffice it to say that Miike then proceeds to shatter any lingering sense of plausibility or, indeed, reality in this scenario.

Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive Trilogy can be purchased from Amazon.com.

2008 Japan Cuts Festival Review: Naomi Kawase's "The Mourning Forest"

The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori). 2007. Produced, written and directed by Naomi Kawase. Cinematography by Hideyo Nakano. Edited by Yuji Oshige and Tina Baz. Music by Masamichi Shigeno. Art direction by Toshihiro Isomi. Sound by Shigetake Ao and David Vranken.

Cast: Machiko Ono (Machiko), Shigeki Uda (Shigeki), Makiko Watanabe (Wakako), Kanako Masuda (Mako), Yoichiro Saito (Machiko's husband).

Naomi Kawase’s latest film, The Mourning Forest, winner of the Grand Prix at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, is such an ineffable, all-encompassing experience that mere words seem inadequate to describe it. But I’ll give it a try anyway. The film expresses a very animist sensibility, in that the natural world, and the sounds and space associated with this environment, are given great priority. Many of the visual compositions in Kawase’s film consist of extreme long shots that depict human characters as tiny figures in vast fields and forests. Connected with this is the notion of the very porous boundary between life and death, which is given concrete form in a couple of scenes. The film’s concluding titles explain the concept of mogari, which Kawase describes as “the period devoted to mourning, thinking back on the dearly beloved. It is also the place of mourning.” This may be her attempt to provide a bit of an anchor to viewers baffled by what has come before. Much more than non-narrative, Kawase has a distinctive style that is actively anti-narrative. Like other Japanese filmmakers such as Hirokazu Kore-eda and Nobuhiro Suwa, Kawase comes to her fiction features from documentaries, and her films retain a very strong documentary quality, with scenes that feel as if they were caught as they appear before the camera rather than being planned beforehand. In a key scene early in the film, a Buddhist priest gives a lecture to an audience at the retirement home where much of the film is set, illustrating what it means to be alive. The rest of the film is a quest to explore that question, through very tactile and sensual means tied to the natural surroundings of the film’s setting.

The plot, or to be more accurate, the situation of the film is a deceptively simple and spare one. Machiko (Machiko Ono), a young woman grieving over her lost son, works at a retirement home in rural Nara, which is also Kawase’s childhood home, and the setting of all her films. One of the people living at the home is Shigeki (Shigeki Uda), a man seemingly suffering from Alzheimer’s and still grieving for Mako, his deceased wife, who passed on 33 years before. This is a significant anniversary; as the Buddhist priest explains, in the 33rd year, a deceased person makes their final transformation into a Buddha. Shigeki is drawn to Machiko, mostly because of the similarity, in his mind, with his wife’s name; during a calligraphy class, Shigeki blots out the middle character of Machiko’s name to spell out his deceased wife’s name, “Mako.” Shigeki still sees Mako, who appears to him in two scenes in the film. The beginning of the relationship between Machiko and Shigeki is rather rocky. He violently throws her out of his room when, while cleaning, she attempts to throw away a rucksack that contains objects valuable to him. Afterward, however, things improve between them, and they are soon playing together like children, chasing each other through fields and climbing trees. One day, they set out together on a road trip. Machiko’s car breaks down, and while she leaves him alone to search for help, Shigeki wanders off into the thick forest nearby. After a frantic search, she soon finds him, and they venture deep into the forest, where it turns out that Shigeki is searching for the place his wife is buried. Machiko’s job is to be Shigeki’s caretaker, but at some point these roles become reversed, and this journey into the forest becomes a way for both of them to heal the pains of their respective losses.

The Mourning Forest, in its close attention to the beauty, mysticism, and subtle menace of its forest setting, brings to mind the films of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady). But while Weerasethakul’s avant-garde training employs his films’ settings as a site for formalist experimentation, Kawase is much more organic and mysterious in her methods. Her gifts for vividly rendering natural landscapes have invited comparisons to the films of Terrence Malick, and her minimalist aesthetics also connect her films stylistically to recent works by such directors as Carlos Reygadas (Japon, Battle in Heaven, Silent Light), Paz Encina (Paraguayan Hammock), and Vimukthi Jayasundra (The Forsaken Land). But Kawase has an inimitable style and sensibility that is all her own. “There are no formal rules,” Machiko’s co-worker Wakako (Makiko Watanabe) is fond of saying, a statement that could also serve as Kawase’s credo. Her cinema represents, as much as anything else, a method of meditation, and the result is suffused with sadness, beauty, pain, and joy, all of which are inextricably intertwined in this film’s flawlessly poetic vision.

The Mourning Forest screens on July 2 and July 7 at Japan Society as part of the Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film. Kawase will be present for a Q&A following the July 2 screening and will also attend the July 3 screenings of “The Origin of Naomi Kawase,” two programs of Kawase’s short films, intimate and confessional documentaries exploring her family history. These shorts screen again on July 12. You can read my interview with Naomi Kawase here.

Defective Detective

Mad Detective (San tam). 2007. Produced and directed by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai. Written by Wai Ka-fai and Au Kin-yee. Cinematography by Cheng Siu-keung. Edited by Tina Baz. Art direction by Raymond Chan. Music by Xavier Jamaux. Sound design by Martin Chappell.

Cast: Lau Ching-wan (Inspector Chan Kwai-bun), Andy On (Inspector Ho Ka-on), Lam Ka-tung (Ko Chi-wai), Kelly Lin (May Cheung), Lee Kwok-lun (Wong Kwok-chu), Karen Lee (Gigi), Flora Chan (Business Woman), Lam Suet (Fatso).

Leave it to Johnnie To and his great collaborator Wai Ka-fai to breathe new life into that most shopworn and exhausted of genres: the police detective story. Mad Detective, their latest film, is a cast and crew reunion of sorts. This is To and Wai’s first co-directed feature since 2003’s Running on Karma, and this new film indulges in a similar cockeyed mysticism to that earlier one. Also, erstwhile To stalwart Lau Ching-wan returns to the Milkyway Image (To’s production company) family after several years’ absence, in the complex central role as the titular crazy cop. Bun (Lau) is a detective whose working methods are, shall we say, more than a bit unusual. In a pre-credits sequence, he solves a murder and mutilation case by having another cop stuff him in a suitcase and throw him down several flights of stairs to simulate how the victim met their demise. He emerges and correctly fingers the murderer. As strange as this is, Bun’s true madness is revealed in a jaw-dropping scene that occurs shortly afterward. At a superior’s retirement celebration, Bun proudly cuts off his own ear and offers it as a going away present. And this film’s patented weirdness continues from there.

Bun’s self-mutilation is disturbing enough to his superiors that he is forced to quit the force. Five years later, his erstwhile partner Ho Ka-on (Andy On), enlists his help in an internal investigation involving Ko Chi-wai (Lam Ka-tung), whose partner disappeared in the woods on a case, and who is suspected of his partner’s murder. The film’s central conceit, rendered in both narrative and visual terms, is that Bun supposedly sees beyond the surface of people to their “inner personalities,” which are shown on screen as alternate personages seen through Bun’s eyes. Bun believes Ko has seven multiple personalities, all of which appear in clusters where everyone else, including the increasingly skeptical Ho, only sees one. This device, used repeatedly throughout the film, serves to throw us off-balance, and we are never able to fully trust what we see. It takes a while for us to realize, for example, that Bun’s wife May (To regular Kelly Lin), whom we first see strenuously objecting to his resumption of police work, is in fact a figment of his imagination. We eventually become as disoriented as the film’s protagonist as we witness his ever more bizarre and puzzling actions. Throughout, the overarching question remains: is Bun crazy like a fox, or just plain crazy?

As usual with Johnnie To, there is style to burn all through the film, especially in the climactic hall-of-mirrors shootout sequence. And although there are some serious lapses in internal logic, and exactly how Bun is able to come to his amazingly intuitive deductions is left disappointingly unclear, To and Wai deliver a satisfyingly challenging metaphysical gumshoe thriller.

Mad Detective screened this past Sunday at the New York Asian Film Festival, and opens on July 17 at the IFC Center. It is the first of a Johnnie To two-fer at the festival; the other is the breezy, gorgeous Sparrow, screening June 26 and July 2 at the IFC Center. You can read my review of that film here.